Workbook: Memos & Dispatches On Writing

By Steven Heighton

Since selections first appeared in the New Quarterly and the National Post as part of “The Afterword,” Steven Heighton’s memos and dispatches to himself — a writer’s pointed, cutting take on his own work and the work of writing — have been tweeted and retweeted, discussed and tacked to bulletin boards everywhere. Coalesced, completed, and collected here for the first time, a wholly new kind of book has emerged, one that’s as much about creative process as it is about created product, at once about living life and the writing life.

“I stick to a form that bluntly admits its own limitation and partiality and makes a virtue of both things,” Heighton writes in his foreword, “a form that lodges no claim to encyclopedic completeness, balance, or conclusive truth. At times, this form (I’m going to call it the memo) is a hybrid of the epigram and the précis, or of the aphorism and the abstract, the maxim and the debater’s initial be-it-resolved. At other times it’s a meditation in the Aurelian sense, a dispatch-to-self that aspires to address other selves — readers — as well.”

It’s in these very aspirations, reaching both back into and forward in time — and, ultimately, outside of the pages of the book itself — that Heighton offers perhaps the freshest, most provocative picture of what it means to create the literature of the modern world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781770900974

Steven Heighton

STEVEN HEIGHTON (1961-2022)’s most recent books were the novel The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep (Hamish Hamilton, 2017), the Governor General’s Literary Award–winning poetry collection The Waking Comes Late (House of Anansi Press, 2016), and the memoir Reaching Mithymna (Biblioasis, 2020), which was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. He was also the author of the novel Afterlands, which was published in six countries, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and was a “best of year” selection from ten publications in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. The novel was optioned for film by Pall Grimsson. His other poetry collections include The Ecstasy of Skeptics and The Address Book. His fiction and poetry have been translated into ten languages, have appeared in the London Review of Books, Tin House, Poetry, Brick, the Independent, the Literary Review, and The Walrus Magazine, among others; have been internationally anthologized in Best English Stories, Best American Poetry, The Minerva Book of Stories, and Best American Mystery Stories; and have won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Gerald Lampert Award, the K. M. Hunter Award, the P. K. Page Founders’ Award, the Petra Kenney Prize, the Air Canada Award, and four gold National Magazine Awards. In addition, Heighton was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Journey Prize, the Moth Prize, and Britain’s W. H. Smith Award. Heighton was also a fiction reviewer for the New York Times Book Review. He lived in Kingston, Ontario. In 2021, Wolfe Island Records released an album of his songs, The Devil’s Share. To listen, visit www.wolfeislandrecords.com/stevenheighton. 

Book preview

Cover: Workbook: Memos and Dispatches On Writing by by Steven Heighton.

Also by Steven Heighton

Fiction

Flight Paths of the Emperor

On earth as it is

The Shadow Boxer

Afterlands

Every Lost Country

Poetry

Stalin’s Carnival

Foreign Ghosts

The Ecstasy of Skeptics

The Address Book

Patient Frame

Essays

The Admen Move on Lhasa

Anthologies

A Discord of Flags: Canadian Poets Write About the Persian Gulf War (with Peter Ormshaw & Michael Redhill)

Musings: An Anthology of Greek-Canadian Literature (with main editor Tess Fragoulis, & Helen Tsiriotakis)

Chapbooks/Letterpress

Paper Lanterns: 25 Postcards from Asia

The Stages of J. Gordon Whitehead

Work

Book

memos & dispatches on writing

Steven Heighton

Logo: a misFit book.

ECW Press

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

—Wallace Stevens

Any memo is both a memento mori and a love note to the world in its wondrous variety and profusion.

—Stamatis Smyrlis

Denn meine Heimat ist das, was ich schreibe.

—So my homeland is what I write: unattributed aphorism from a German scholarly magazine, circa 1994

Foreword

W. B. Yeats believed that we turn our arguments with the world into essays, our arguments with ourselves into poetry. But is his idea—for all its neat symmetry, its epigrammatic authority—true of all writers who work in both forms? Giving the question some thought, I realized my own arguments with the world, and with myself, are more likely to gel into a form that’s neither essay nor poetry.

Before I settle on a name for the form, let me explain why I use it. The brevity I can’t seem to force on my fiction (I’d love to write four page stories, or 150-page novels) or even on my poems (I admire the haiku, but my natural leanings launch me onward for another ten, twenty, fifty lines), I bring automatically to these inner arguments, which take the form of short, tight paragraphs, epigrams, memos.

Why not regular essays? Maybe because I sense that the full cosmos is clamouring to get into any essay a writer begins. To me, every direct statement about the world seems laughably incomplete—seems to imply and require its contradiction—seems to dictate, Now tell the other side. Which I feel obliged to do. Which then mandates counter-contradictions and qualifications and so on, in a sort of Hegelian chain-reaction: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, leading to another thesis, etc. I grow impatient with the enterprise and yet the alternative would seem to be mendacity through omission, which is akin to propaganda. So I stick to a form that bluntly admits to its own limitation and partiality and makes a virtue of both traits—a form that lodges no claim to encyclopedic completeness, balance, or conclusive truth. At times, this form (I’m going to call it the memo) is a hybrid of the epigram and the précis, or of the aphorism and the abstract, the maxim and the debater’s initial be-it-resolved. At other times it’s a meditation in the Marcus Aurelian sense, a dispatch-to-self that hopes to address other selves—readers—as well. Even the two essays that frame this book exemplify the form, having accreted, coral reef wise, out of a group of impressionistic paragraphs and sentences, each one whole in itself and yet fragmentary: intended provocations, prods to further thought, dispute, and assertion.

S.H., Kingston, December 2010

I

Given to Inspiration

I am not bored at the moment, though it might be better